Fragmentation
Coming Soon…
Earlier this year, SEA Junction and A New Burma co-hosted Fragmentation, a photo exhibition by photographer Nyein Chan Aung, at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC). The event highlighted the lives of displaced teachers and their students in Karenni State, exploring how education persists even in the midst of conflict. During the show, five participants were interviewed: Tim, a co-curator; Nicola Edwards, an education researcher with years of experience in Myanmar’s ethnic areas; Patrick, a frontline medical doctor in Karenni State; Mya Hein, a student unionist and minority rights advocate; and MCP, an artist, cultural organizer and gallery manager. Their discussions weave a shared narrative of resilience in the face of war, education, humanitarian response, identity, and creative resistance within Myanmar’s ongoing crisis.
Tim, in addition to being the co-curator of the show, is also a graphic designer. He describes how the exhibition was constructed to convey a raw, unfiltered reality while avoiding sensationalized suffering. “School bells are associated with starting school and ending school, or at the beginning of the day,” he says. “But if somebody is ringing the school bell longer than it should, if it is longer than a minute or so, it's basically an airstrike siren, and they all would run to a bunker.” He explains that there are two, parallel, photographic series, one depicting a teacher who lost his family in an airstrike, and the other children engaged in ordinary classroom moments, like studying, drawing, and even taking shelter during air raid sirens. For Tim, the juxtaposition of tragedy and normalcy reflects the tensions of present-day life in Karenni State. He emphasizes the importance of displaying both the grief and resilience, particularly the hope embodied by children who continue learning despite the relentless danger. To him, Fragmentation seeks to remind the world that Myanmar’s suffering continues, while conveying the enduring hope of its teachers and students.
Next is Nicola, who describes how airstrikes have deliberately targeted schools and health facilities. In Karenni State and beyond, children now study in bomb shelters or improvised jungle classrooms—a harsh but widespread reality since the coup. Yet she highlights how this devastation has accelerated new, locally driven solutions. “Basically, we need to rethink education,” she says. “Because of my Western background, I imagine a school as being a building with qualified teachers, with a national curriculum framework, with assessments moving forward to go to university, for example, or to become an engineer or a plumber. This situation is making me rethink that.”
Ethnic education providers such as the Karenni Education and Culture Department and the Ta’ang Education Committee have expanded parallel systems that integrate mother-tongue instruction, cultural history, and community-based protection measures. Nicola also notes how, in Chin State, grassroots educators are creating curricula to reflect local needs despite extreme hardship and limited resources. This localization, she argues, is reshaping education in ways that challenge traditional top-down models. Community members, including untrained but committed volunteers, have stepped in to teach, provide stability, and help shield children from the trauma of conflict. For Nicola, these acts of kindness and courage demonstrate that education in Myanmar is no longer simply about formal schooling: it is now a form of social defense, hope, and resistance.
Patrick connects the struggles in education to those in healthcare, both of which are under direct attack from the military. He frames his decision to work in a conflict zone not as heroism but as a personal choice grounded in moral obligation. “My hospital has been destroyed because of last year’s [airstrikes],” he says. “But my teammates survived, and my patients also survived.” For him, the community enduring relentless violence, yet continuing to support one another, fortifies him. A large portion of his work in Karenni is treating civilians— sadly, many of them children— who have suffered catastrophic injuries from bombings and ground assaults. He recounts firsthand the terror of living and working as airstrikes hit, sometimes surviving by only seconds, and describes mass killings, evidence of executions, and the overwhelming emotional burden of treating victims in such conditions.
Despite these horrors, Patrick emphasizes the solidarity of frontline workers. He and his colleagues coordinate across hospitals, share resources, and support one another emotionally, celebrating small victories to sustain morale. His experiences reveal a grim but unbreakable determination rooted in empathy for the most vulnerable.
Mya Hein joins the discussion and stresses that for him, the revolution’s true significance lies in its potential to reimagine Myanmar’s social fabric. He recounts his own political awakening amid years of state-sponsored discrimination. Growing up in a small town near Yangon, he experienced both social exclusion and the consequences of rising nationalist rhetoric. Those experiences, coupled with his early exposure to political literature and the student movement, drove him to join the Student Union, where he found connection and inclusion absent in wider society. “My parents wanted me to stay home, so I found out the way that books are a very good experience for my youth,” he says. “The combinations of the my own experience in school and on street and the experience from the books combined, so then I wanted to be in politics since I was in middle school.”
Following the 2021 coup, Mya Hein relocated to liberated areas for safety, continuing his activism as a Muslim student unionist while witnessing what he describes as a period of unprecedented solidarity—at least on the surface. In the early months after the coup, urban communities displayed remarkable mutual support, and there were even public apologies from members of the majority Bamar population toward minorities. However, he came to feel that many of those gestures did not represent a real commitment to structural change, often tied more to political expediency than to genuine social reconciliation. Mya Hein emphasizes that minority rights must become central to the political struggle if Myanmar is to achieve lasting peace and equality.
Last up is MCP. He explores the role of creativity in Myanmar’s resistance. Before the coup, he describes a gradual opening of artistic space, and creators began experimenting with freer forms of expression. That period, he argues, actually helped prepare Myanmar’s creative community for its role in the revolution, when art became both a tool of survival—a way to overcome fear, articulate truths—and a way to reach audiences emotionally where political arguments may fail. He explains how the exhibition’s photographs of children and teachers in conflict zones confront viewers with both pain and hope—an artistic approach that resists the normalization of Myanmar’s suffering. “I think that this is not a new story, because people are normalized,” he says. “It's Myanmar. There's a war, blah, blah, blah! But in this I want to tell a new story about that. In this exhibition, we have two types of story. Some are hope, some are deeply of pain. We had hope, and then we had pain that I want to talk about, the theme in our exhibition.”
MCP also emphasizes that the revolution has transformed not just how art is produced but how it is received. A new openness has emerged, especially among younger generations who engage with art as a form of political and social dialogue. For MCP, art does not merely document the crisis; it creates a shared space for empathy, solidarity, and moral clarity, allowing people to feel the realities of war and education in ways statistics or reports cannot convey.
These conversations reveal the deep interconnections between education, healthcare, social justice, and creative expression in Myanmar’s struggle for survival and dignity. Through them, we see not only the devastating impact of conflict but also the extraordinary resilience and ingenuity it has inspired, where communities continue to build, teach, heal, and create in the face of state-sponsored violence. Together, they offer a powerful reminder that hope in Myanmar endures—not as an abstract ideal, but as a lived, daily act of defiance.